


Human

by twentyfourshreds



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Dissociation, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Memories, Pneumonia, Suicidal Thoughts, and its not played for laughs, idk science?, rick is old and regrets much, this sounds darker than it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:26:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26134177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twentyfourshreds/pseuds/twentyfourshreds
Summary: He spent sleepless nights understanding the passage of time, but not feeling the pressure and urgency that most of the population would. He didn't feel most things, now, but his grandson is sick, and he needs to care for him despite how unreal his skin feels.
Relationships: Rick Sanchez & Morty Smith
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	Human

**Author's Note:**

> I was really going through some stuff at the time, so enjoy in-depth descriptions of dissociative episodes.  
> Rick is a person in need of a lot of help.

_Self-awareness is not what I had intended it to be_ , the empty dark cavern of his mind spoke. He looked down at his hands, the ashy grey skin looked foreign against the muted cream of the carpet. He traced the creases in his palms and fingers with his eyes. He slowly turned his hands over making constellations from the liver spots and scars that pocked his skin which stretched over long bones and tendons. He noted a misshapen nail on his right hand. 

He gently ran the tips of his fingers across the back of his left hand. The touch was feather-light, and his nerves sent a message of a ticklish brush zinging up his arm. He let out a shallow breath, and pushed his thumb into the meat of his palm, pushing on the nerve until his wrist ached. He could still feel the rest of his fingers on the back of his hand, and an irrational flicker of annoyance danced in his mind. 

The small room felt like a cathedral. His thin frame felt more fragile to him than it had had in over thirty years. He remembered feeling this fragile, it was one of the happiest moments of the life that belonged to a man that shared his name and space. A man that he could never become again.

_The man named Rick stood in a plain white hospital, nervously wiping his hands on his bluejeans and trying to convince himself to stay outside the hospital room as cries and screams echoed out. The minutes passed slowly and the screams grew with frantic need and then ceased, only to be followed by the quiet wail of much smaller lungs. A nurse poked her head out of the room._

_"Mr Sanchez, you can come in now." He could barely hear her as he lept off the wall and followed her into the room. The bed was still a mess and his Dianne lay reclined on the elevated bed, sweat had pressed her hair flat against her forehead, and her face was flushed with exertion. He made his way to her, ignoring the doctor and nurse in the far corner as they ran tests on the small wailing bundle. He pressed a kiss to her forehead and gripped her hand whispering things he couldn't remember. The doctor came to them, wailing bundle in her arms. The bundle was passed to Dianne and he saw a sliver of pink wrinkled skin._

_"Congratulations Dianne, it's a healthy baby girl." He heard the doctor say, and something welled up in his chest, tears brimming in his eyes as he watched his wife tiredly smile as she peered into the now-quiet bundle. Then she looked up at him, eyes full of love and asked him, "Do you want to hold her?"_

_He couldn't speak as he cradled the bundle to his chest the little body was so small he felt enormous, big enough to want to envelop his newborn daughter to protect her from everything, anything. He gently prodded the fabric away from her face, the wrinkled mass somehow the most beautiful thing in the world, because he had helped create her. Her little tiny hand was balled up against her body and he brushed his fingers against the fragile skin, watching her stir, and he felt tears fall down his face as he knew he'd try his damndest to protect her but would fail._

The man of now closed his eyes in the darkness of his room as if he could keep the warm, dim light of the hall outside at bay with the cold, empty darkness of his mind. His hands felt too hot to hold his skin and he let them dangle from his wrists as he sat, head bowed over his knees. The fragile feeling dissipated as he distracted himself with the faux-confidence that the memories of every death-defying experience he had put himself through: the wars, the adventures, and every damn attempt to end it all tried to wash out the feeling that that memory had filled him with.

The fragileness of his ancient body was a constant in the cathedral of the spare room of his daughter's house. He let the feeling waste him away, an empty hollowness pressed up against his ribs, he was a husk of the man that shared his name. The same face, borrowed from another body, augmented beyond what was reasonable, but the mind and memories of the original mind he possessed. He felt like he was watching the world through a movie theatre's projection. The theatre showing the sad, dark existence of a man who, when left alone in his thoughts, he dissolves like teeth in acid. A man who sits dressed in nothing but his grimy tank and boxers on a foldable cot with a mattress so thin he cannot help but feel the improper weight distribution of his body as he sleeps- where he just stares and thinks.

Drowning himself in memories of the man he once was, he rarely even relied on his crutches of alcohol and self-destruction to aid in his deterioration- all he needed was this improbable cavern of thought and sleepless nights.

His eyes were still shut as a shadow slid to hover in the hall light that passed under the door. His ears heard nothing as a quiet hand slowly turned the knob. His mind was trying to kill him in both the past and the future, as the door opened. Light flowed into the room as the door slowly opened, the brightness seeping through his closed eyes. The flicker of annoyance came back. He didn't respond.

He waited as he knew that a head would poke through the open space, the head's owner could be anyone in the house, but he imagined the round, young face of his grandson. All ungrown and so much like his father it was uncanny. He imagined the concern that creased the young face, and the wide-eyed worry that would likely shape his face as he peered in on the sight of his grandfather thin and scarred hanging his head over his knees, silent, hands still, back rising and falling out of necessity, rather than will. The light began to dissipate and he imagined the face retreating, and returning the door to the frame, the knob to its resting position, and the shadow from under the door flickering out of sight and back down the hall.

That was what he wanted to happen. What was, in his mind, the most logical outcome, however, it was not the truth. The door had opened, yes. The head that had peered through was indeed his grandson's and there was a little concern and a wide-eyed worry on his face as he imagined the scene. What he didn't see was bloodied tissue in the young man's hands or the sweaty dishevelled state of his pyjamas.

He never registered the teen stepping over the threshold into the small cavern, closing the door as quietly as he could behind him or how he pressed his back to the door and slid down as silent as he could until he felt the rough fibres of the carpet under his hands and he sat staring at the outline of his own feet in the dim light, waiting for the right time to speak.

Rick never noticed as the minutes passed into hours. Slipping in and out of alertness as easily as oil over water, he eventually found himself lying back on the cot, facing the ceiling and lying ramrod straight. The dim light of the hall was dimmer than he expected and he looked at the door to the rest of the house.

There his grandson sat, head lolled forward shivering and sleeping as he waited. He sighed and sat up. The creaking of the springs jolting the young man awake, who wiped at his face with his hands and looked up at the shadowy figure on the cot. Wheezy breaths passed out of his mouth as he picked up the tissue that had fallen on the carpet, dabbing at the blood on his lips as he kept his eyes on the figure.

He silently watched his grandson, sleep blurring the lines between thought and reality, but the fragileness of hours earlier was nowhere to be found. He had slept off the pain, and now it was time for him to get to work.

He stood, his grandson now pulling his feet closer to his body as he watched him go about the little room, pulling up a pair of slacks from the ground and a sweater that was tossed on the back of a chair. He turned to face the figure that was now curled against the door.

Not feeling up to the task of speaking, he lazily flapped his hand to motion for his grandson to move from the door, and surprisingly he had understood the message and shakily got to his feet, wheezing as he stood. Rick's eyes narrowed at the sound and he opened the door of his room. Light flooded into the room and he walked out and down the hall, the straight shot to the garage was a blessing. His grandson followed much like a loyal dog as he shuffled to the garage.

Once the door was opened and the lights turned on, he cleared a spot on the counter and patted it twice, a part of his mind noted that action was very much as if his grandson was a dog. He waited for the kid to scramble up onto the counter and took the bloodied tissue from his hands. The young man opened up his mouth to speak, but he closed it with a firm push of his hand, shaking his head. No talking, not right now.

He opened his grandson's mouth and took a flashlight from the counter and peered inside. Nothing was immediately amiss and he took down a box from a shelf above the counter searching and finding a device that looked much like a portal gun, but stunted about a quarter of the way and with a glass display sat into the top.

He booted the machine up and it whirred quietly as he typed in the specifications of the subject he was scanning. He held the machine at the top of his grandson's head and slowly passed the scanner over his body the glass screen lighting up with a scanned copy of his grandson, which was rendered in bright blue.

He peered at the image, zooming into the lungs, finding an unsettling amount of bright blue dots resting at the bottom of his lungs. He leered up at his grandson, wondering what had happened. The soft wheezing was cut off by a wet cough and he hid his mouth with the sleeve of his pyjamas.

A glob of something stuck to the fabric and he plucked it off of his grandson's sleeve with a pair of tweezers placing the fluid into a dish. He pushed a hand against his forehead, the heat radiating off of his sticky skin was worrisome. The warmth was in stark contrast to the cold touch of his fingers. His eyes lingered on the ashy digits as he let his arm determine his grandson's temperature. His watch blinked a steady 104.38 and he knit his eyebrows as he set back to work. He opened a cabinet, a refrigerator concealed behind the veneer greeted him with the soft release of suction. He pushed aside chilled experiments, vials, and jars of mysterious biological substances, searching for the last vial he knew was sitting in the back of the surprisingly sterile mini-fridge. The vial of pink, milky antibiotics waited beside the shrivelled fetus of himself and a row of cybernetic eyes in various shades of blue. With a slight, pleased press of his lips, he snatched the vial up. His grandson coughed once more wheezing harder as oxygen came scarcely into his blood.

He swapped the vial for the dish, placing it under a stray microscope and peering through the eyepiece. He fine-tuned the knobs, focusing the image as much as he possibly could. The bacteria in the mucus swam lazily around their little saline home, and he began to scowl at the circumstance. One hand opened a drawer, a small dark injector was resting in the clutter of wires, screwdrivers, and other handheld devices. He placed it on the countertop, still eyeing the shifting shape of the microbes. He pulled himself away from the sight as he heard another round of wet coughs beat his grandson's chest. He stood straight, assembling the medication, his mind caught up in watching his hands through the movie screen of his eyes, as he slotted the vial into the bay. There was a click and then a gentle hum from the machine. He pulled back the damp collar from his grandson's neck and pressed the cold metal into the heated skin and pulled the trigger. The effect was instantaneous, his grandson seized up, breath leaving his lungs in a raspy whine, his eyes rolling back in his head as he was left catatonic.

Rick slowly placed the injector down, scooping up his still, fever-warmed grandson from the counter and opened the hatch to his underground lab. He slowly descended the ladder, taking care not to hit his grandson's head too harshly against the metal walls.

The dark passage leads him to a room where an examination table sat. The white medical bay unnerved him, the setting was too formal, and he grimaced as he placed his grandson on the table, gently easing the tense joints flat and propping his head up. He grabbed a stool and perched on the cold surface, waiting a few seconds, watching for something wrong, and then got up. He messed around with small menial tasks, inserting an IV into his grandson's arm, setting up a monitor, and placing an oxygen mask on him. He then left the room, white lights dimming to let the green accent lights glow softly, the lock beeping quietly as he left the medicine to do its work.

He climbed the ladder and stood in the garage, staring blankly at the large door. The sky was still dark and he huffed, turning to clean the dish in the microscope. He needed something else to do, so he trudged upstairs to his grandson's room, and ignoring the stale teen-age smell in the room he took the blankets, sheets, and pillowcases and dragged it all downstairs he sloppily loaded the washer and started it up, the white noise of the machine filled the garage with a soft symphony. He sat at his workbench, picking through scattered projects to focus on a monotonous action, such as reconfiguring the ship's console or even finally getting around to changing the fluorescent lights of the garage to the much quieter Lumi-Rays he'd picked up on his last trip to the Citadel of Ricks.

He did neither. He just sat staring once more at his hands, his mind leisurely jogging as he thought not of the empty feeling in his limbs or the movie screen protector of his mind, but the work he would do, or could do or has already done.

He thought over improving the efficiency of the memory gun he had developed a few years before. He pondered on making a more powerful blaster-- with adjustable beam diameter. He wondered about his grandson and how he had inhaled the spores from the Blasthieran mushrooms when they mined the hyper-ionised Quantum Quartz Crystals just two days prior. He had made sure to supply the little idiot with a mask, but he must have broken the seal during the mining process. 

He shook his head and looked back at his hands, cold, grey fingers rested on the countertop, nailbeds purple and veins dark blue. He traced the shadows the lights cast over his skin, the harsh lines between the light and dark, the mid-tones filling the spaces outside of the contrast. He felt his eyes grow distant, his perception of detail lessened incrementally, and he understood what he was seeing but it was as if his brain had stopped bothering to care about the specifics of the shape of his hands or the folds of skin over his digits.

He felt himself try to swallow with a dry mouth, and he numbly reached out to a random to-go coffee mug on the counter and took a sip. A familiar warmth bloomed in his mouth and extended its vines down his throat and into his stomach. He felt like filling the empty hole in his ribcage and the warmth of the drink was a poor substitute, but a substitute nonetheless.

He drained the mug, and stood, opening a cabinet door and taking out a few bottles of both human and alien soporifics. He looked at the time, plenty enough to fill the void in his chest and pass out for two hours before the day began. He pressed a bottle to his lips and began to slip into his vices, creating dangerous contraptions and drinking himself into sleep.

He slept hard, and the two hours he had left himself with had him waking up as his daughter opened the door to check on her son and him. He shot up when she called for him, and with drool still wetting his chin he squinted at her and tried to mumble a coherent sentence to assure her that her son was fine, and the two would be at the table in no time. It came out more like a half-assed jumble of words but she got the idea. He watched her leave and took a small pen from the desk and jabbed it into the side of his thigh. He pressed the plunger and was woken up fully with an electrolyte and sugar concentrate.

He stood and wearily descended into the lab below. Walking down the cool hall to the medical bay, he saw his grandson sitting upright and twiddling his thumbs as he waited, the IV was thankfully still attached. He opened the door and the lights overhead came on, the white room almost blinding as he stepped forward and over to the scanner, he checked the readings and found it satisfactory. His grandson was strangely quiet, and he glanced up at his hunched form. Reminiscent of the very same head-bowed-over-knees, hands dangling off of his wrists posture he had displayed the night before. Although, he was certain that it was caused by fatigue and soreness from the antibiotics. The IV was nearly empty and he unhooked his grandson from it and the scanner the disease was practically nonexistent but as a precaution, he slapped a patch on the teen's neck and watched as the fabric turned pink as it tried to leech the bacteria from his body.

He quietly got his grandson to stand, and escorted him to the ladder. Rick was preoccupied swatting his grandson's fingers from the large patch on his neck as he tried to feel the texture of the bandage. He ushered him forwards watching as his feet slowly rose above his head and he followed after. 

The smell of Saturday morning breakfast seeped under the door to the garage and his grandson groggily made his way to the dining room. He followed silently, and noted his lack of a lab coat, trying to wrack his brain for the last place he had left it. A memory of it lying in the footwell of the back seat of the ship played in his mind as he sat at his place at the table. He helped himself to bacon, two eggs, a slice of toast and a large cup of black coffee. The food was a warmly welcomed addition to his stomach, the remaining acids from the night dispersing with the help of the toast. There was idle chatter as his daughter's family spoke around the table, even his grandson, whom he'd assume would have a throat too sore to talk, gave a few short sentences to his mother and sister, and even a couple of words to his father. He had loaded up on toast and bacon, along with a rather large glass of orange juice that sat in front of him.

At least his appetite was back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
